Jimney and me

I was born in Penrith NSW, in December 1981. Two years and two months later, James was born in the same hospital.

I am the youngest in my family which consists of my Mum and Dad, my two older brothers Jack and Richard, and my older sister Louise. James has one younger brother, Andrew. James and I grew up in neighbouring towns, but we didn’t meet until 2004. James went to public school while I attended the Catholic school.

In November 2003, I started work as a personal carer at Lewin Lodge, Springwood. James started work in the kitchen of Lewin Lodge in February, 2004.  The first time I remember really looking at James was one afternoon shift.  James asked if I wanted dinner from the kitchen.  I said yes and he said “you have a vegetarian salad right?”.  I was shocked as none of the kitchen staff remembered that I was vegetarian, even though I had told them everytime I worked.  I said the same to James and he said “I’m vegetarian too”.  This was the first lie James ever told me and he has had to stick to it ever since! We liked each other almost at first sight but did not start going out until April as I hurt my hand at work on the 1st of March, 2004 and had time off.

On the 12th of April, 2004 I was at work and needed to go to Penrith to the shops after work. Due to my hand problem I was unable to drive and James had driven me home from work a few times. I needed to get to the train station to go to Penrith and at that stage walking too much hurt my hand due to the vibration. I asked James what time he was finishing work and he offered to drive me home. When I explained that I needed to get to the train station, James asked where I was going. I replied “Penrith”, to which James said “Oh, I have to go to Penrith today. I’ll drive you”. It was pretty obvious that he didn’t need to go, but I let him drive me anyway!

The next day we went to a movie after work and James felt so guilty about lying to me about needing to go to Penrith that just as the movie started he leant over to me and said “I have to tell you something – I didn’t actually need to go to Penrith yesterday”. When I replied “I know” James was shocked as he thought I wouldn’t want to talk to him again if I knew that he had lied.

From this time on we spent more and more time with each other, seeing each other every day (in fact the total count of how many days we haven’t at least seen each other is still less than two weeks). On the 24th of December, 2004 James proposed to me at Martin’s Lookout, Springwood and we got married on the 17th of July, 2005 in my parent’s backyard. The wedding was planned to be in December, however, my sister decided to move to China and was going to have to leave in August for the best chance at getting a job so we moved the wedding forward. It was a bit of a rush to get everything ready in just two months, but it all came together really quickly and was a beautiful ceremony (the most stressful part of it all was James being in hospital due to a major throat infection and only getting out a week before our wedding!!).

In April 2006 we brought our house in Ulverstone Tasmania and moved into it in April 2007.

In early 2008, James and I both had to stop working due to his health problems.  We subsequently had to sell our house and we moved back to the Blue Mountains in May 2008.